Comprehension of directly and indirectly stated main ideas and details in discourse by brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged listeners

Exploring the Cognitive Basis of Right-Hemisphere Pragmatic Language Disorders

“…They have also proven capable of producing direct and conventionally indirect requests normally (Semmer et al, 1994). In terms of comprehension RH subjects have shown they are sensitive to the presence of pronoun anaphora to connect information within a text (Brownell, Carroll, Rehak, & Wingfield, 1992), can generate simple inferences in short stories (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984;Brownell, Potter, Bihrle, & Gardner, 1986;McDonald & Wales, 1986), and can interpret comments as sarcastic in a forced-choice format (Kaplan et al, 1990).…”

The Neuropsychology of Autobiographical Memory

“…The first two criteria identify the patient as a visual agnosic; the third criterion demonstrates that the deficit arises from impaired access to long-term visual memory rather than a difficulty generating, manipulating, or interpreting images (Farah, 1984). We found 11 cases that met these three criteria (Albert et al, 1975;Beyn and Knyazeva, 1962;J. Brown and Chobor, 1995;Gomori and Hawryluk, 1984;O'Connor et al, 1992;Ogden, 1993;Ratcliff and Newcombe, 1982;Shuttleworth et al, 1982;Taylor and Warrington, 1971;Trojano and Grossi, 1992;Wapner et al, 1978).…”

The Use of Contextual Information by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in the Resolution of Ambiguous Pronouns

“…Hough (1990) has interpreted this difficulty as evidence for an imIJairment in the use of the macrostructure of a story, which is important in establishing global coherence (Kintseh & van Dijk, 1978;van Dijk & Kintseh, 1983). It should be noted, however, that this interpretation may be challenged by the resu1ts of Brookshire and Nicholas (1984). They found that in a task requiring subjects to answer true or false questions about auditorily presented short stories, RBD patients exhibited the normal pattern of recall by remembering the main ideas of the stories better than the details.…”

“…Also, as Hough (1990) pointed out, the discrepancy in results may be attributed to the redundancy in the stimuli. She noted that Brookshire and Nicholas (1984) suggested that their brain-damaged subjects performed well because the text was redundant. In contrast, according to Hough (1990), the stimuli she used were intentionally not redundant.…”

“…Although not directly stated by the authors, such a result would seem to indicate a certain sensitivity to the macrostructure of the text A possible explanation for the discrepancy in these results relates to the size of the subject groups used. In Brookshire and Nicholas (1984) only five RBD patients and five normal controls were used. Perhaps, therefore, the size of the groups may not have been sufficiently large to provide for adequate statistical power to detect group differences.…”